Chapter 15 #3
The word. Love. It sits on the table between the two pints like a third glass nobody ordered. Can’t pick it up, can’t push it away. Can’t pretend it’s not there.
I drink. The Guinness is half gone. When did that happen.
‘I’m not in love.’
The pint goes down, the sticky carpet. Ewan’s face doing the brother thing where he knows exactly what you’re thinking and he’s going to make you sit with it. The telly’s got the volume off or my ears have. The rest of the pub is far away.
‘You remember Charles? The summer you were twenty. Next door’s eldest brought him back from uni for the holidays, and he was about the whole summer, and the two of you were inseparable, and you didn’t talk about anything else.’
‘What?’
‘I was thirteen. I watched the whole thing. And for the record, Charles was gorgeous, properly gorgeous, and I fancied him rotten and he never once looked at me. Eyes only for you, all summer. Which I have made my peace with.’ He drinks.
‘The bank holiday, the pair of you got steaming on Dad’s cans in the back garden, and you put him to bed in your room and climbed in after him.
And in the morning you were up before anyone, cooking.
Toast, eggs, beans, “might as well,” sweating so much you could’ve dripped on the pan.
Breakfast for eight. Nobody said a word. I clocked it and kept it.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘The point is I clocked you before you clocked yourself. You shared a bed with the fittest lad either of us had ever clapped eyes on and cooked half the kitchen for him in the morning and called it nothing. I was working myself out that summer. I didn’t need a word for me. I watched you not have one for you.’
‘We didn’t touch.’
‘I know you didn’t.’ The voice doesn’t change. He sets the pint down. ‘I’m not asking if you touched him. I’m asking what you’d have done if he’d tried it on.’
I don’t answer. The Guinness, the condensation on the glass.
Charles that summer, the uni talk, the whole of July and August I found a reason to be wherever he was.
The two of us in my single bed, the lager and the dark, his back against my chest, and me hard and wide awake and rigid with not moving, telling myself it was the beer, antsy for hours and not letting myself work out why.
Him gone in September and me not knowing what the flat feeling was. The answer to Ewan’s question is the not-answering. We both hear it.
‘I wasn’t ready.’
‘Course you weren’t. You were twenty and you didn’t have the word and nobody in our house was going to hand it to you.
You had girlfriends, Ron, real ones, I’m not rewriting that.
You also couldn’t breathe right for a whole summer over a lad.
Both true. You just couldn’t hold both in the one head, so you dropped the one that didn’t fit the story and called it nothing.
’ He picks up his pint. ‘And you’re still at it.
Telling me you’re not in love when you moved cities for a person and can’t sit still saying their name.
That’s not different. That’s just the toast again.
More expensive toast, your own rent now, same thing. ’
I press the mark through the fabric. Ewan’s not wrong. Ewan’s never wrong about this.
‘Laurence’s the first one I didn’t make breakfast for,’ Ewan says. ‘That was different. That was. I was scared, not hiding it. Big difference.’
‘And?’
‘And he fed me. He made the breakfast. I didn’t have to cook it. I didn’t have to pretend it was for company. And it was terrifying and perfect and the only thing I want to do now is wake up and do it again.’
The pub, the pints.
‘What if he works you out?’ I say. ‘What if he figures out you’re only with him because you got tired of the cooking?’
‘He already knows I’m a lazy bastard who burns toast.’ Ewan pushes the empty glass away. ‘He made me the toast anyway. That’s the whole thing, Ron. That’s everything.’
The third pint, the sticky floor. The word in the glass between us that Ewan said and I can’t put back. Love. Four letters that fit in the bottom of a pint glass and don’t come out.
I finish the pint. Ewan finishes his. He goes to the bar. Comes back with two more. Sets mine down, sits.
Neither of us says anything for a while. Football on the telly, an arguing couple. Carpet sticky under my boots. The word still on the table. Can’t unhear it. Ewan knows, the clever bastard.
He looks at the table. At the wet ring his glass left on the mat. And his voice changes, thinner.
‘We had a row, a couple of months in. Worst one we’ve had. I walked out of the flat.’
I look at him.
‘Didn’t say anything. Just. Left. Walked round Chorlton for two hours in December. No coat. My phone was in the flat. He thought I’d gone for good.’
‘Why.’
‘He’d started talking like it was permanent.
A holiday booked for the year after, the word “we” starting to mean years instead of weeks.
Forever stuff. And I picked the fight because forever meant there was finally something I could lose, and some part of me would rather blow it up myself than stand there waiting for it to be taken off me.
I knew how to chase a thing and how to fuck it and how to be clever about it.
I didn’t know how to just stay. Stand in it.
And not run.’ He picks up the pint. Puts it down. Picks it up.
I’ve never heard Ewan say this. Never heard his voice do this, the thinness, the edges showing. Walked out of a flat in December with no coat because the thing had got too big to stand still inside.
‘What happened?’
‘I went back. He was sat on the sofa with my coat over his knees and the kettle already on. He said “I’m not going anywhere, Ewan. You can keep trying to wreck it to save yourself the wait, or you can let me stay.” Then he got up and made toast, because that’s what he does when he can’t find the words, and burnt it, the way he always burns it. ’
The coat, the kettle. The man who burnt toast instead of asking where I’d been.
‘Burnt toast,’ I say.
‘Worst toast I’ve ever had.’ The half-smile. The one I know, the Ewan one, the one using one side of the mouth. ‘Best morning of my life.’
‘So you were scared.’ My voice comes out flat, not a question. ‘And you went back.’
‘Scared shitless. And went back. Yeah.’
‘How d’you know when to go back.’
‘You don’t. You just go.’
I look at my brother. The grey jumper, Laurence’s.
The hands that don’t shake anymore. The kid who climbed into my bed when Mum and Dad were rowing.
I’d lie there and feel him breathing and the breathing was scared and I’d put my arm over him and say nothing because I was twelve and I didn’t have words either.
And now he’s sat in a pub in Manchester telling me about burnt toast and I’m sat here with a lipstick mark under my polo and we’re both the same. We’re both something Dad wouldn’t recognise. Something better. Something the house in Lewisham wasn’t built for.
‘Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thanks.’
He drinks. Doesn’t say for what. Doesn’t need to.
‘Another?’ Ewan says. Like he didn’t just drop a grenade on the table and walk away.
‘Yeah.’
The pub, the draught. The word that won’t fit back in the glass.
I walk home, past the bar, the lights are off. Celyn’s shift doesn’t end for another hour.
The bed that’s made because Celyn made it this morning. I don’t make beds, never have, and the duvet is flat and the pillows are straight because it’s Celyn’s handwriting on my flat.
The bed, the edge. My boots still on, the lipstick mark under the polo. I pull the collar down and look. A faded smear, almost nothing, almost gone.
The word. It’s in the flat now. Ewan said it in the pub and I carried it home and now it’s here. In the mug, in the made bed, in the charger. Love, four letters. The ones Ewan walked out of a flat in December to avoid. The ones Laurence said over burnt toast.
My phone buzzes.
Shift’s done?
I look at the message. The question mark that isn’t really a question.
I type: Just got home
Send. The reply’s instant: Wear the grey t-shirt.
I want the pleasure of taking it off you.
Then, before I’ve even put the phone down: And don’t start without me.
I put the phone down, pull my boots off.
Leave them by the door where Celyn’s Converse will go in an hour.
Two pairs, four shoes. The same arrangement every night.
The word, in the flat. In the two pairs of shoes.
I’m not saying it tonight. Don’t need to. The word’s already in the flat. Already in the hour I’ve got before Converse hit the stairs.
I pull the polo off. Sit on the edge of the bed.
When the Converse hit the stairs I’ll be up before the key turns. The body’s already decided.